A DECISION-SUPPORT SYSTEM FOR PRODUCTION ACTIVITY CONTROL

The increase of manufacturing system flexibility makes variations in r outings, operations, machines or operators possible. These degrees of freedom may be used at the Production Activity Control (PAC) level in order to react to unpredictable events such as machine failures, absen ce of operators or changes in the workshop environment. In order to ma nage these degrees of freedom, we suggest a Decision Support System th at should make the choice of solutions easier in order to reduce the c onsequences of a failure. This DSS complements the scheduling module o f the PAC system since it may be used, either in order to slightly mod ify an existing schedule, or to choose the scheduling hypothesis. This DSS uses fuzzy logic and theory of possibility because of the impreci sion and uncertainty of the information managed, first to model the ob jectives, then to spread the expected consequences of an imprecisely k nown event. The DSS has successively been prototyped with the SuperCar d(TM) environment on a Macintosh microcomputer, then with the Oracle(T M) data base on a Sun Sparcstation.